-The Indian Express Drought for 2nd straight year leaves tribals of Attapaddy at lenders’ mercy, hits pregnant women’s health Attappady: At the sun-baked village of Nallasinka in Attappady, a frail woman is desperately scanning a pipeline that takes water to a private estate, looking for a leak that was once there. “It is five days since water reached our colony. Last week, we survived by collecting water that leaked out of this...

-The Indian Express Given the slow pace of currency printing and indications from govt sources, it is unlikely that there will be full replacement of banned notes As currency in circulation is about 20 per cent lower than the levels at the beginning of November 2016, the sharp decline in the pace of remonetisation over the past few weeks and indications from government officials suggest that the government and the Reserve Bank...

-The Indian Express We have been numbed by a series of lies, myths and fictions about the project. India is at risk of becoming a surveillance state, with faint resistance from libertarians, intellectuals, political parties, the media, or the Supreme Court. Very soon, almost everyone will have an Aadhaar number, seeded in hundreds of databases. Most of these databases will be accessible to the government without invoking any special powers. Permanent surveillance...

-The Indian Express Six months on, there appears little justification for demonetisation in theories of politics, governance. Demonetisation has been evaluated through multiple dimensions — political, economic, constitutional, legal — and the role of the institutions involved. However, what were the philosophical underpinnings for “the most sweeping change in currency policy that has occurred anywhere in the world in decades”? One might think demonetisation was from the utilitarian school (given the rhetoric around...

-The Indian Express The Indian Express travels down the meat value chain in Uttar Pradesh to find a seamless system that’s now under strain. FOR Puran Chand Sharma, dealing with Mohammad Sabir Qureshi is a twice or maybe thrice-a-year affair. But this transactional relationship is essential to sustaining his dairy farm operation involving 10 female buffaloes — three now in-milk, two pregnant animals, two young yet-to-calve heifers, and three one-year-old calves. “The ones...